Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King

Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just 35, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt was remembered as the ace of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a character study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship.

In the dark days of World War II, Henry’s victories in France were presented by British filmmakers as exemplars for a people existentially threatened by Nazism. Churchill called Henry ‘a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England’, while for one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, ‘the greatest man who ever ruled England’. For Dan Jones, Henry is one of the most intriguing characters in all of medieval history, yet at the same time one of the hardest to pin down.

He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he was also creative, artistic and literary, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members; yet he always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved his shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured England’s borders and in foreign diplomacy, made England a serious player once more.

Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses. Unlike many competing volumes, Dan’s life of Henry V stands out for the generous amount of space it allots to the critical first 26 years of Henry’s life before he became king. Both standalone biography and a volume that completes his sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, Dan Jones’s Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England’s greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.